Mar 15, 2015

Well, You Looked Dead To Me

Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report on Social Security's efforts to deal with situations in which the agency receives some information suggesting the possibility that a beneficiary has died but not definitive proof of death. Two of the situations identified by OIG were mail returned as undeliverable or a beneficiary who cannot be located. Not surprisingly, there are often overpayments in these cases when it turned out that the beneficiary had died. The agency often failed to recoup the money in these cases. OIG identified 58 cases involving about $1 million where that happened.

This is one of those reports where you wonder whether OIG considers the collateral costs of what it is recommending. Sometimes people move and fail to leave a forwarding address. Sometimes the Post Office fails to properly implement a forwarding address. Sometimes a John Smith is reported to have died but the agency needs the death certificate to make sure it doesn't cut off benefits to the wrong John Smith. Sometimes people just disappear. Sometimes they reappear. An overly aggressive approach to these types of cases could save money but it could also cause benefit terminations for a lot of people who aren't dead. That's an enormous hassle for those whose benefits are wrongly terminated. Social Security doesn't have an army of employees with time on their hands to quickly investigate and sort out these cases.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I am so tired of OIG reports and recommendations that fail to put the problem and the proposed solutions into some operational perspective. Some things must be of a lower priority, not everything is vital but OIG gets credit for "savings" and doesn't have the problem of implementing the solution. In fact, they get to criticize how the agency does implement recommendations, giving them multiple bites at the "see how sharp we are" apple. .

We see a couple of these cases a month, and they all share common characteristics: aged individual, a death report from CMS, who always have phone numbers over 7-10 years old.

True, most of them turn out to be deceased. However, a significant number do turn up alive (a victim of CMS' inexplicable inability to discharge somebody from a hospital without reporting them dead. In short, CMS should redesign their software to make it much harder for someone discharging from a hospital to be reported dead, not that it will ever happen).

Another "justifying our existence" report by OIG. Little relevance to real life. Plus, only $1 mil in savings? The idiots who wrote that report must have been on punishment detail or something....

And, believe it or not Chuck, many of these people "play" dead. SSA makes many attempts to reach the person by phone, mail, email, etc., but nothing. Suddenly marked as deceased, and voila, now they want to contact SSA. Hmmmmmm, what's with that?

As I recall, back in the ancient times of almost unlimited resources, SSA conducted an annual undeliverable project where SSA would attempt to locate anyone whose annual COLA notice was returned by the post office as undeliverable. Many times this is due to people not updating their mailing address while the benefits continue to go to the same correct bank account.

Of course, large numbers of people are out of the country too. I found that usually when you stop payments for address issues, 99.99 percent of the time, folks show up to the office wanting their money.

The ones that didn't show up, with very rare exceptions, were out of the country, incarcerated or dead.

I can only recall one case in 20 years where the claimant, was so mentally disabled, they did not know what was going on, and didn't come into the office right away. The person finally came into the office to file an initial claim for benefits, and was reinstated with a rep payee.

For the SSI couple cases, quite a few wrongful death terminations were employees posting the death to the wrong member of the couple.

I suggested to management to have only the more seasoned Claims Reps to do SSI inputs, and was told "well everyone has to learn". Despite being told how to do these transactions, the same reps would continue to "kill" the wrong member of the couple, and it was quite maddening having to deal with their incompetence, along with sad and angry members of the public.